Weekly Update 5/5/2023

Welcome to the first discrete error mini episode weekly update thing.

Thing that we don't have an official name for. But right now it's the weekly update.

It's the weekly update. Now, the reason for this kind of episode is that it might be really easy to fall into the belief that all Ian and I do all week is play PlayStation Two games.

It's all we fucking do, man. Just that.

And while it is a lot of what we do, we play other games as well. We play a lot of other games. Video games are a big part of our life. So much so that we started a podcast about video game.

Yeah. So that should tell you something right there.

So the goal with this is to every week just chitchat for 1015 minutes and bullshit about the games that we're currently playing that aren't on PlayStation Two and just kind of give you guys a deep look at the twisted minds of the discreet air podcast guys.

I like that. Twisted mind.

Twisted, twisted minds.

Fall on CBS, CSI Twisted Mind.

And sometimes you might get hints and stuff at future episodes. But what I hope you guys get from this is just some more of us. And that's what you want. We did a little mini poll and everyone seemed on board for this kind of episode. And so here it is. Ian?

Yes.

What have you been playing this week?

This week I have spent a good amount of time with I think it's a fairly it's not brand new. It's a little older game. It's a PC game, actually. Well, I've been playing in my Steam deck and I will promise to get a full review of the Steam deck, but not today. And it's called the vampire survivor.

Oh, the crack in game form?

Yes, it's crack in fucking game form.

Yeah. I refuse to play it because I don't want to get addicted.

It's a good call because I got it. It was one of I think it's free. No, it's really cheap. And I got it on a recommendation from my friend who had a Steam deck and he said, get this one, it's great. And I downloaded it. I was playing other stuff for a while and then I played it a few times and I really didn't like it because I sucked at it. And I was like, well, this is kind of dumb. And I picked it up again last weekend and started playing it. And it's an interesting thing. I got over a hump and suddenly I was a fucking monster killing machine. And it became so fucking fun that I just can't put it down. I don't think I've opened another app on the Steam deck in a week. I've only been playing Vampire Survivor and I've just been leveling up characters, buying the upgrades, getting new levels. It's just a fucking lot. It's addictive. I read somewhere that the creator either worked in casinos or knows someone. You hear all this bullshit from people that knows the dopamine hit of a slot machine going off and work that in. I think it's an interesting theory because there are some elements. But also you don't need to have worked in a casino to know what people like.

So I guess if you popped an oxygen mask on and played this game, you just absolutely ruin your life.

Yeah. With oxygen, with no clocks. And people feed me free drinks. I'd probably gamble away all my fucking nonexistent kids college funds before you fucking know it. Playing Vampire Survivor, I will say I don't think there's going to be much more of playing it. But if the game's smart, they'll know there's another level I can hit where I will get re addicted. But the diminishing returns are starting where I'm just going back and just playing levels. And I've kind of figured out how to make they do do a good job of scaling the difficulty. But I'm feeling like an ultimate killing machine and kind of hit that. I'll play this for five minutes, I'm bored, blah, blah, blah. So it may not be the reigning champion this time next week. I doubt it will because I've got a lot to play. But it has been a fucking hell of a week, I'll say that. So Vampire Survivor, you've all heard of it, in my opinion, it's worth the hype if not because it's so cheap, too. It's a good time.

Well, it's funny that you're playing Vampire Survivor. And considering we just recorded an episode about a game that's being turned into a TV show, they're making a Vampire Survivor TV show. I just read an article on IGN about it like yesterday.

That's going to have nothing. There's no story to that.

Yeah, it's going to be an animated show, which is very interesting. I think we're seeing the Marvelization of video games 100%. It's just all media is all popular. Media is kind of homogenized as it is. But I think we're seeing that with the success of The Last of US. Last of us is the Iron Man. Yes, it is. Video games transcending the medium, right?

100%.

Iron man was like the first comic book movie where they're like, damn, that's good.

That's actually a good movie.

Yeah. Oh my god, this is actually good. So now they're just going to fucking throw everything. I guess the question is who's going to be the Kevin Feige of video games? I'm thinking it's going to be Sony, right? Like Sony considering their Marvel movies are not great. But no, they're working on the God of War TV show.

Yeah.

Which I mean, shit, who knows?

Who knows?

But also, speaking of God of War, this week I have finally committed to at least trying to get through 2018 God of War.

Beautiful.

So I've been playing a lot of 2018 God of War this week for the first time I've gotten past kind.

Of like the opening area with the stranger. Yeah. And then outside the house walking through the woods and shit.

Yeah.

Boy.

And I like it. I do have a pretty significant issue with this game, though.

Oh, I need to hear it.

Yeah. Anybody who listens to this podcast or has met me or been in my apartment knows that I am a massive Resident Evil fan. And my issue with the Resident Evil Three remake is the exact same issue I have with God of War 2018 in that I fucking hate interactive cutscenes. I do not like them. Just give me a cutscene. I will be more invested in a story by just watching a cutscene than I will by pushing forward on the fucking joystick the whole time.

Yeah.

I do not like it. I do not like gameplay that's just like, I can't do anything and I got to listen to this person talk while I'm carrying a fucking pig. And that's it. I can't go fast. It locks you out of controls, out of actions, so you're forced into doing an action. It completely removes any immersion for me.

Yeah.

Completely takes me out of it.

However, I agree with you, but they did it better than anyone because your son will keep walking and then he'll stop talking and be like, are you coming? And then you'll catch up to him. And it's not just a repeat of the line. It's like a different take with an indication that things have stopped. It's actually pretty fucking well done. I agree with you, sure.

But it's immersion breaking for me. And as of right now, I like the first God of War much more than I like the 2018 God of War. That's not to say there's not things I don't really like about it. I really enjoy the combat in God of War. It's super fun. They obviously nailed it. It's a lot of fun. There's like a good varying amount of enemies. I don't kind of love what seems to becoming the central hub of this game. The Lake. Yeah, I don't love it. I don't love that kind of thing. It's a little too backtracky. Kind of like well, because I like Metroidvania games, which are like the hallmark of those games. And the hallmark of Resident Evil games are backtracking. Something about this one feels sluggish. But again, I'm only like maybe like three or 4 hours into the game.

So you're just getting into the lake. You're just in the lake.

So what I did is it's very obvious when you get to the lake, like, where you're supposed to go.

Yeah, of course.

So instead of doing that, I decided I'm going to go off and do all the side missions I can except.

For the ones that are literally impossible because you're not high enough level. Right.

But I did do one that I'm definitely not high enough level for by kind of cheesing. It the Eldon Ring player in me shining through.

Nicely done.

Get a quest to destroy a statue of Thor for a spirit and the enemies on this island where this statue is will One shot you. So basically, I cheesed it by having Atreas shoot them with an arrow. And then I just, for five minutes straight threw my axe at this enemy while kiting him around the beach and dodging all of his attacks. Just throwing my axe at him over and over and over and over again. Not letting him get close because you can't parry any of his stuff. You can't block any of his stuff. Blocking will only the only thing blocking will do will make him kill you in two hits instead of one hit.

Yeah. That first hit is a freebie. Yeah. I will say it picks up a lot after that, and that's all I'll say. The point you're at, I kind of would have felt the same way, but it gets a lot better.

Yeah. What I'm doing is I'm doing the same thing that I did with Eldon Ring, right. Where the only Souls game I have beaten is Dark Souls one way back in the day, and I brute forced my way through it. And then I kind of stayed away from Dark Souls or Souls like games because they just seemed like the difficulty level was too high for me. But then when Elven Ring came out, I was so excited. And it's funny, I'm not good at the Dark Souls games. I love them. I have sunk dozens of hours into all the Dark Souls games and Bloodborne and Sekiro, and beaten virtually none of them. But I love them. I love the atmosphere. I'm not letting being bad at a game prevent me from playing it. That's great because I do think that Bloodborne, especially, is so difficult for me. But I consider it a masterpiece, even though I've never beaten it, because it's just the level of immersion in that game is insane. But with Eldon Ring, when Eldon Ring was about to be released, I decided, no matter what, I'm going to beat this game. I will not play another game until I beat this game. And I brute forced my way through it. And it's one of the best games I've played in the last decade. Eldon ring is incredible. I ended up beating it seven times, getting to new game plus seven, doing everything I could possibly do.

It is.

The only platinum trophy I have on PlayStation Network is Elven Ring. And so I'm taking that approach with God of War because so many people have told me so many things about it. And I really want to play ragnarok.

Yeah, Ragnarok is good, too.

And I feel like Ragnarok might be better. I feel like it might be the thing where everyone says God of War II is better than God of War One. I think that it had to have improved. People lost their minds over ragnarok. But I don't want to play ragnarok first because then I'll never want to play the first one.

No, there will be no reason to ever play it. Play 2018.

Yeah. So I'm going to force my way through 2018 and then I'll play ragnarok. I'm going to force my way through it one way or another. By hooker, by crook, I'm going to beat it. I've also been playing a little bit of WWE two K 23 with some whatnot? With some whatnot? Pals.

Oh, my God.

Which is actually, like, a lot of fun.

I've heard it's really good. I've been burned on, so I know it's not two K Games or whoever was doing it before. I know it's a new developer. I was burned on so many versions of the WWE Franchise Games.

Yeah, this one's a lot of fun. We should play it online.

I'm ready.

I'm fucking yeah, the online play is really fun. We do like, triple threats or we do Royal Rumbles. So then other players come in and fucking mayhem.

Oh, my God. It was either 16 or 17. It might even been 15. But a friend and I bought it was a year old. So we got it for like 599. We were just like, in GameStop and we saw it and we created a wrestling staple and fucking we won the tag team titles together. And then he won fucking Heavyweight title and I won the other title. And then his roommate, who we always made fun of, we made him part of the staple and then we turned on him. The games just got really boring really fast because the gameplay sucks. But just telling little wrestling stories is always fun. And yeah, I'm excited to try it.

Oh, absolutely. We made like a wrestling faction with it's, NWO. But with the W is the whatnot? Logo.

Beautiful? That's fun.

And we all made custom wrestlers. The customization is insane in that game. And you can download other people's custom wrestlers. So other people just straight up make wrestlers that aren't in the game?

Like, existing wrestlers, right?

Yeah. And the level of detail is insane. Like, I downloaded Sting. I was a WCW boy in the 90s. Until pre Attitude era. I was all about WCW. And so Sting was like sting was like a huge part of my life as a kid. So downloading sting. The level, like, the talent that some of these people who are making these wrestlers online have is insane. It looks as if he's just in the game because he's, like, signed with AEW, I believe. So he can't be in the game. And someone made him. And it looks perfect. Picture perfect.

Is it original? Old school. Good sting or stupid? The crow sting.

I mean, you can download both, right?

Okay.

You can download Joe biden.

That's funny.

Yeah. We're working on a way to do a triple threat match between Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden.

Fucking awesome.

You got a street. And they look really good.

Wow.

But it's the crow. Sting, of course. The best. Sting.

I disagree.

The best. I do. Like, what was it, the Rockers? No, that's Sean Michaels.

Yeah.

They're like the California Boys or whatever, his tag team thing. But I'm a big fan of Sting's entire Uvoir, his entire body of work. And you can download, like, some crazy stuff. And it's pretty incredible. You can download custom move sets, custom graphics. It's a pretty robust online thing. I didn't understand how big the community behind this kind of game was. It is massive.

That's cool.

It is absolutely massive. And yeah, the game's, like, a lot of fun. I mean, I haven't played a wrestling game in years.

Yeah, they're not great usually.

I think the last wrestling game I played was probably like, here comes the pain on PS Two.

Shit. Wow, that's old.

Yeah, I haven't played any recently, but a bunch of people in a group chat that I have with some whatnot? Pals. They all wanted to down one of them, got it for free and convinced us all to get a copy so we could play online. And it's a lot of fun.

Fucking awesome.

It's a good time with pals.

There you go.

So you should download it and we can all right, fuck it online. I can give you some sweet chain music with HBK.

What are you on with it? You have PlayStation or PS Five?

Yeah, I have it on PlayStation. Okay. It's not cross play.

That's why I asked.

Yeah. So if I were you, I just get the like I normally am very much pro physical edition. I recommend just getting the digital edition.

Yeah, of course.

Because then you can download either the PS Five or the PS Four version, and you can switch back and forth. It comes with both. So if you want to play with someone that has a PS Four, you have to download the PS Four version.

And play it on my PS Five.

Yeah, you can play it.

PS Five. Fucking world we live in. I know.

I wish they could just fix that and have it crossplay view. I feel like crossplay is not that hard. Can't be that hard. I did pick up my Advanced Wars preorder this week.

That might be my next week. I don't know. I'm going to buy both of these, probably. But I have a history with Advanced Wars, and I want to talk about my history and I want to play those games again. I love fucking Advance Wars.

Oh, hell yeah. Me too. I never had the sequel on Game Boy Advance, but I put dozens and dozens of hours into the first Advance Wars.

Yeah. Beautiful.

Have you been playing anything else other than Vampire Survivor?

Something I don't probably talk about at a future point because I'm going to go back to I've been playing Marvel Snap, but I'm not even sure you can count that. It's like a digital it's like a mobile card game.

It's really yeah, you love those games, though. I remember our first bonding over playing games was playing Hearthstone at work because we had nothing better to do.

This is a lot different than Hearthstone, but it's marvel and it's fun. I mean, I've gotten to the point where I have almost every card. It's a fucking grind, but it's become very stale because everyone has figured out the best decks. And the latter system needs a lot of work, in my opinion, because it's too much grinding. But getting a cool card or variant of a card is still fun because again, you get that dopamine hit. But that one is like I'll play that just like on the fucking sitting on the couch. If nothing's on TV. If my wife is watching something, I'm not particularly interested. And I'll play it. But yeah, I'm not. But there's a couple of other ones that I will bring up in a future time because I've kind of taken some time off from them. But I'll definitely be back.

Sweet. Well, I've also been playing Resident Evil Four on the switch.

Okay.

So the port of the original Resident Evil Four, I've been playing it on the switch because, spoiler alert, we are doing a Resident Evil Four episode coming up, right? And I wanted to be able to talk about all the ports. And I've played most of the versions except for the switch. I'd never played it on switch.

Oh, interesting.

So I wanted to see how it handled on that. And I have to say I'm pretty impressed by how it translates to switch. I think I've been playing on my switch light.

Okay.

So I've been playing it undocked. And that's like an interesting experience.

Right?

But we have a bunch of PS Two games that I have to play coming up because on May 12, it's all over for like two weeks with Tears of the Kingdom.

Yeah.

That's going to be basically my entire life for probably two weeks. Tears of the kingdom.

I probably would say the same, although yeah, I'm looking forward to that. I mean, I've spoken that. I'm really looking forward to advance wars.

Yeah.

Tears of the kingdom.

I'm also really looking forward to Diablo Four, which comes out on my birthday.

When is that? I didn't know the exact release date.

June 6.

Okay. So that's coming up.

Fuck the Devil's Day this is going to be. I did play the open beta on PS Five.

I didn't.

I played it the weekend they had it available. I mean, it's more Diablo, which I'm.

Always down for, of course. And the only thing I heard was you can't do the roll constantly. And I was all about rolling my way through every level.

Yeah. Or jumping. Yeah. I have too much Add for you to not let me do that. I'm assuming a lot will change. I mean it's blizzard. It's Blizzard, so I'm assuming it's going to be rough at launch, always is. And then it'll slowly be patched into perfect shape because I think Diablo Three is incredible. Where it ended up is incredible. And I think playing it on the switch might be the best way to play it, to be honest.

I was just going to say that I played it for a little while when it first came out. And then when I got my switch, it was one of the first three games I got. And as soon it was in, I was like, they changed this and playing it in this format even I was playing it on planes. I played the fucking hell out of that game.

Yeah, it's like low key perfect on Switch because that's a game I think the only game I've bought more than Diablo Three is Resident Evil Four. Right? So I got Diablo Three at launch, played it on PC, loved it. But I mean, I had a ton of problems and I played the shit out of it. And then I stopped playing. And then when Reaper of Souls came out, I decided to play it on PS Four. And I loved it. I fell in love with it all over again on PS Four. And then I started a whole new character. Like, I never played Necromancer on the PS Four or on PC. But when the Ultimate Edition came out on Switch, I rolled a Necromancer and I was like, this is the way to play it. I did preorder it on PS Five because graphically, I want to see what it's like. But it's a game that I can honestly see me probably ending up getting on Switch eventually. It's the perfect the Switch is perfect for that kind of game. I downloaded the Boulders gate remasters and Diablo two on switch. And those games play perfect on Switch.

Get those, too. I must be spending a lot of money in the summer.

Yeah, I mean, Hades is so good. The Switch is a dungeon crawler machine.

Yeah, it is.

It is a beast for dungeon crawlers. And it's kind of like I mean, especially if you travel or you're on a plane or something. It's so good.

Fucking awesome.

Hell yeah. Well, that was our weekly update episode. Our first weekly update. We hope you guys liked it.

We sure do.

So we're going to be releasing these every Friday.

PS Friday. Oh, no.

PS. Fucking a Friday.

Fucking a Friday is beautiful.

Fucking a Fridays. So let us know what you think. Let us know if you have games that aren't PS Two related that you want us to play. As you can see, we play a lot of games. And as much as our focus is the PlayStation Two, and we have a deep love for PlayStation Two, we play a lot of other games and we play a ton of other consoles. I have everything. With the exception of like, Turbographics and NEOGEO and the Jaguar. I have basically every console. And I love hearing about new games and I love hearing about games that make other people excited, gets me excited to play them.

Absolutely.

Awesome. So we will see you next week.

See you then.